


Slough

by etherati



Category: Watchmen
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Dreams, M/M, Masturbation, Non-Graphic Sex, One Shot, Pre-Roche, gn!verse, wow pretentious
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-31
Updated: 2010-01-31
Packaged: 2017-10-06 21:48:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,236
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/58105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/etherati/pseuds/etherati
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sequel to <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/58058">Laundry</a>, in which Rorschach needs something more, and the reality of his situation starts to take shape.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Slough

**Author's Note:**

> Kinkmeme fill, prompt was something to do with Ror sleeping in Dan's basement where all of his laundry/underwear is? But I kind of twisted it into a sequel to 'Laundry' and crammed it full of crazy religious imagery and some metaphor with snakes? IDK.

*

The first time, it's an unforgiveable lapse of resolve – a corruption he cannot forgive himself for as he lies spent and half-naked and filthy on the cot, the scent that finally pulled the sickening pressure out of him still lingering in his senses. Behind closed eyes, the faint dancing sparks look like vicious angels, furious at his transgression, their wings traced in a fluttering and abstract light so brilliant that his eyes can only hold the barest edges of it; flickers of one reality bleeding into another, into his inadequate mortal mind, threatening and sharp.

When he sleeps, his visions are filled with invisible hands, taking him to pieces – rending flesh and muscle, snapping joints from their sockets, digging fingernails into his chest and peeling the skin back from his bones – and this is no numb surreality of dreaming, every nerve alight, and he screams and screams until his voice is no more. The hands slip in between his ribs to grasp at that horrible writhing snake, heat and sickness, slumbering now wrapped around his heart; when they pull it free it feels like being turned inside out, like being doused in a fire that does not cleanse, like dying alone in a gutter, hollowed out and unreal –

He wakes up to the smell of coffee from upstairs, and feels an ache in all of his joints and down the length of his breastbone, ghostlike fingers still sinking in as if through clay.

*

If he's unusually quiet that morning, it's because he hadn't slept well and is tired; not because his head is filled with thoughts of penance and punishment, of the angels tearing him to shreds and how he's been forced to live to remember their torture. Of how he deserves it. It's certainly not because Daniel is standing too close, in a shirt he'd worn last Wednesday and pants from the Monday just before, smelling too much like himself for Rorschach to bear.

He lifts the coffee, and the bittersweet mix of it drowns everything else out, and he tries not to think of the way that every angel's hand, digging in and ripping and drawing the evil out of him with uncaring efficiency, had felt like Daniel's.

*

The next time he stays over, he does not intend to repeat his mistake. The cot's sheets have been cleaned and a blanket folded at the foot of it, a concession to the gathering chill of early winter, and when Daniel changes out of his costume he does not toss the shirt into the hamper with the rest of the sweaty mess – just idly sets it aside, on a nearby workbench, in the open.

Rorschach doesn't notice – and even if he does, it doesn't matter.

It doesn't.

*

He's starting to consider the idea that staying here – between these walls, breathing the same air as Daniel, sharing the same shifting black dreamspace, tossing in sheets that must have once been on Daniel's bed – may be the real mistake.

*

It isn't enough.

He knows it should be. He's convinced himself that if this thing must exist, must squirm under his skin and leave him achingly hard every night, lying in his apartment, counting cracks in the ceiling, willing the perversion to pass – that at least it is tied up in Daniel's strength, his courage, his willingness to shed blood and lose sweat to help the innocent. That he doesn't need or want anything more than to drown himself in that bracing presence; that his hands may crave the solid feel of muscle shifting under them, tensing as it does in the rush of battle, but they do not need to dig deeper, to uncover secrets and wrap around them and fall headfirst into Daniel's darkest places.

But the cloth's accessibility, the way he hasn't had to dig for it or secret it away, the almost permissive way it's been offered for his use –

_(No, not possible. There's no way he could-)_

has drained it of its intractable pull. It's still _good_, an intangible stirring like Daniel's hand in his at the end of a long night, warming him through with the raw strength of his character, but it isn't _enough._ And if he's going to feel the dreaming world's bite tonight, going to earn those vicious hands – and he already has, the moment he gathered the shirt to his face and breathed it in, deep and indulgent – he is unwilling to walk into their grip frustrated and twisted round himself and open to even worse abuses and violations.

*

The hamper is almost empty, so Daniel must have done his laundry recently. He's clean, clean in that transcendental way that repels the filth of the street as he wades through it, and it makes Rorschach feel even dirtier as he paws through the bin like the worst of the perverts they see every night, in alleys, loitering stiffly in the shadowed doorways of whorehouses – but at least he won't be faced with anything but the smell of shower soap and aftershave, in the morning.

*

He tries not to think about what he's doing as he hunches over himself, fabric clutched to his face – tries not to process the implications, the evolution of his degeneracy, this new shape of his sin, riding low and rough in his throat. It's a different kind of sweat-smell entirely, wrapped up in something musky and rich, and the fabric is thin and worn in his selfish fingers. He's _trying_ not to think but the images come anyway, formless shapes creeping out of mist: other skin against the weave, softer and more vulnerable than the rough callused bitten-leather of his hands, nerve endings gathered close to the surface; the way the fine cotton would feel against that flesh as it shifts or rubs or is slid free, down along those planes, fingers hooked under the band and _whose fingers are they-_

This never takes long, his nerves too raw and stretched-thin and wanting. The strokes are short and sharp and painful, too tight, fingernails digging in where they shouldn't, rending the brilliant flush of bright-white pleasure his body's trying to wrap him in into jagged black ribbons, tatters. Something insidious is rising in him, the snake coiling, constricting around a heart that kicks and kicks and fights like a rabbit or a field mouse or some other prey that cannot ever hope to break free –

They're _his_ fingers, rough skin against smooth, sliding low into the hollows of hips, peeling back –

Layers and layers and skin is just another layer –

They feel like Daniel's hands, taking him to pieces, sliding inside, pulling back the flesh and shaking his secrets free from dry, dry bones –

_(He's leaning over now, nuzzling in, nose and mouth burying into the darkness of sweat and delicately curled brown hair – fingers clutching fabric where it bunches around Daniel's thighs, at the sweat that seeps up through it, the cloth just another kind of skin, shedding and shed and forgotten.)_

-and understanding comes a moment before it's over: those hands tear and shred and make him scream because these things are meant to hurt, are meant to break bones and remold them and change is always a bloody, bloody thing.

His mind sloughs away in a blast of heat, laying him bare, shedding and shed and gone.

*

Tonight, when the angels' hands come to break him and remake him, he welcomes it.

*


End file.
